Caesar spoke first. “You came?”
“Of course I came!” she cried. “It’s been a nightmare, Cornel! I haven’t ridden in a car in fifty years! I had Utopia take me, but Romanova has all these ridiculous emergency restrictions. They kept asking questions, said I needed ‘known Members’ to vouch for me. Flagrant Blacklaw discrimination!”
The scowl on Felix Faust told the other half of her story: his sister, monstrous in her skirts and corset, clinging to his arm, while he, still in the Brillist sweater of his public office, drew stares like a magnet.
“But what’s happening, Cornel?” Madame pressed, seizing Caesar’s arm too without relinquishing her brother’s. “Is there any news?”
“Jehovah’s fine,” MASON answered.
“Is it true what I saw on the news? They came back from the dead!”
“As next of kin, Madame, I’m sure you’ll be the first to hear when anything is certain. For now, we wait.”
Her eyes, wrath-hot and hungry for a culprit, locked on Martin. “You’ve some nerve, sitting here cozy when your master nearly died. Why didn’t you throw yourself in front of the bullet? That’s what you’re for, isn’t it?”
No words have power over Martin in Caesar’s presence save Caesar’s own. “No, Madame, it’s not.”
Her wrath would not fade easily. “Even Dominic was some use. I hear he pursued the assassin. Was he victorious?”
“Best leave that issue to me, Madame,” Papa interceded. “The less you say about revenge, the less likely Dominic here is to wake up to charges of unauthorized use of lethal force.” Papadelias had already closed the body bag again and drawn a curtain to hide it, but the bandage cocoon that held the wreck of Dominic lay bare.
“Oh! Dominic!” Madame cried, drawing Faust and Caesar close across her like doors, as if she feared the gore might leap out and contaminate her. ? My poor pup! ?
“The doctors have done all they can.” MASON pried her off, and closed the door. “I have a question for you, Madame.”
She frowned at his tone, a different kind of serious. “What is it, Cornel?”
“I know there is nothing to keep you from lying to me, but I must ask, and if our long friendship is not enough to entitle me to the truth, I hope you understand that I am much better able to tolerate wrongs honestly revealed than lies uncovered later.”
She blinked prettily. “What lies? What has you so concerned?”
“Did you plan this?”
“Of course I didn’t plan it!” she shrieked, seizing his arm again. “You think I’d try to kill our Son?”
MASON tried, but failed, to pull his hand away. “Not that, the rest. You knew Casimir Perry was Merion Kraye. Did you know the rest? The Seven-Ten list theft, DeLupa betraying the Anonymous, the exposure of O.S. Did you plan it? Did you know?”
With only a brief frown at MASON’s coldness, Madame shifted onto her brother’s arm. “No, but it is my doing nonetheless.”
“Explain,” Caesar demanded.
“I shall be honest,” she announced, her voice light with surprise, as if she had expected herself to decide the contrary. “You’re right, I do owe it to you, Cornel, for our long friendship, which I hope will not end here,”—her smile beamed frankness—“and I know you will deal more kindly with me if I am frank with you. Besides,”—she glanced at Papa—“I have done nothing prosecutable, or even malicious. But nonetheless, I take responsibility. I did not plan this.” Her voice was lovely, giddy, as if elated by the catharsis of confession. “I simply resurrected the weapons with which it was done. I made Dana? the sort of woman a man would burn the world for. I made Merion Kraye and Andō and my Ganymede the sort of men who would betray each other, and nurse vengeance for decades, and not just them. Ancelet, and Spain, and even you had jealous days in your youth, remember, Cornel? And you in the inner circle are hardly my only clients. I have dozens of girls and boys, each with dozens of suitors who have been seducing, betraying, dueling, and stalking each other for fifty years. The losers are banished from my house and, finding they can no longer take satisfaction elsewhere, they channel their appetites into grudges against the victors who still enjoy my favor, and high offices. There are many hundreds of talented young things like Kraye out there who, thanks to my children, have no goal in this world beyond revenge on some rival I exalted over them.”
“And on yourself too, of course,” her brother interrupted.
“Of course, myself as well,” she conceded, smiling at tired Felix as she squeezed his arm, “but that’s a danger I’m prepared for. The world isn’t so prepared. Kraye as Perry proved the most talented at marshaling this little army of avengers, but I’m sure Papadelias will discover many co-conspirators who helped Perry create this chaos, so they could wreak revenge on whichever Director or Senator or Member of Parliament or whatever stole their love. The Eighteenth-Century aristocracy seduced, betrayed, and corrupted itself until its world self-destructed into revolution. I didn’t have to destroy you, Cornel. I just turned all of you into Eighteenth-Century aristocrats and let you do it yourselves.”
Whatever Madame’s tone, MASON had no more reason to believe this was the whole truth than you do, reader. “Why?” he asked. “Why do all that?”
“Because I realized I could.” She laughed even as she said it, as if hearing the childishness in her own tone. “Honestly, it was too tempting, all these fantastic weapons shut up in old etiquette manuals and romances, where no one but me recognized what they could do if someone brought them back into use. When you were a kid, did you never have the urge to build an atom bomb, just to prove with your own hands that people could?”
MASON shifted his stance, his weak foot weakening. “And you didn’t care what happened to the world? To my Empire?”
She gave the matter some quick moments’ thought. “I did care. I did, but this world already had all the signs of being on the brink of some great change, you’ve known that for years. Cataclysm was coming. I just thought I could shape the great change, make it my sort, the Eighteenth-Century sort. That way, instead of chaos, it would be a familiar kind of great change, something someone would know how to shape, and take in hand.”
“And conquer?” MASON supplied. “You saw the chance to seize power during the cataclysm, and rule through your son.”
“Rule through Jehovah?” She sighed. “No. Perhaps, a long time ago, when I was planning my pregnancy, I was setting things up to have you all pass power to my child so I could rule through them, but when the child was actually born, I didn’t want to raise a pawn, I couldn’t. You know I’m sincere, Caesar, in my way. I love the Eighteenth Century. I fell in love reading about it at Senseminary, that great moment when humanity realized experiments didn’t just have to be done with sciences, they could be done with morals and religion, too. I wanted to do that, run an experiment like the American Experiment, or greater. I couldn’t resist the chance to finish what my heroes started, not just the humanitarians like the Patriarch and the romantics like Jean-Jacques, but the underbelly, La Mettrie, Diderot, de Sade. The Enlightenment tried to remake society in Reason’s image: rational laws, rational religion; but the ones who really thought it through realized morality itself was just as artificial as the aristocracies and theocracies they were sweeping away. Diderot theorized that a new Enlightened Man could be raised with Reason in place of conscience, a cold calculator who would find nothing good or bad beyond what his own analysis decided. They had no way to achieve one back then, but I did it. I raised an Alien.”